Inside the Right's Rabid Hunt for Anthony Weiner 2.0

MINNEAPOLIS — After accidentally tweeting a photo of his junk the other night, Anthony Weiner scrambled. The Congressman deleted the message so fast that his bulge could not be re-tweeted, nor, apparently, recognized. But it was already too late. Twitter user @PatriotUSA76 — part of the clandestine #BornFreeCrew — had been monitoring Weiner online for months. He used a simple-enough trick to grab the shot ("If you don't refresh your browser you don't lose the Twitter page"), then passed it on to BigGovernment.com founder Andrew Breitbart. What followed was, well, you know.

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Less than a month later, the Congressman and the prowling account are gone — its user, supposedly named Dan Wolfe, evaporated into the Internet, or maybe taking up another official to hound. Either way, he's a ghost again; he could be anyone. He could even have been one of the thousand-plus paying attendees here this past weekend — not quite hackers, but not exactly backwoods conservative yokels either. Which are exactly the kind of foot soldiers that small-government activists are looking for these days.

The Republican "leadership" was meeting in New Orleans, and the liberal Netroots Nation conference was confounding the liberal base downtown. Hell, big names from Pawlenty to Bachmann and Cain were stealing the bandwidth from both of those just down the hall. (Click here for the best quotes from the weekend.) But at the RightOnline conference — more popular and powerful than ever in its fourth year under the Americans for Prosperity Foundation — the real story was offstage. And forget the bloggers themselves — ever find yourself disgusted by the screamingly partisan commenters on news stories? RightOnline — and other breeding grounds like it, catalyzed by successes like Weinergate and leaders like Breitbart — are teaching those people how to never let anything evaporate into the Internet again. The Right, just in time for the 2012 election, is turning yokels into citizen journalists, ghosts into watchdogs.

A Democratized Army

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Tricia Willoughby is fifteen years old. Sitting alongside her two sisters here on Saturday afternoon at the Minneapolis Hilton, at a panel called "Youth Outreach: Not All Students Are Liberal," she had a modest proposal for a roomful of mostly middle-aged — if not just aged — men and women: "The students that go to these classes are the students that you want on your campaigns, working for you, at your events."

Out from the standing-room-only crowd, a teacher asked how the conservative movement could better engage high-schoolers. "Guys, you have got to get into public schools," he said.

It was not entirely coincidence that the day before, The New York Timesreported on two Twitter users, posing as teenager girls, who had solicited Weiner in an attempt to draw the Congressman into impropriety. Between the how-to panels here ("Becoming and Effective Citizen Journalist," "Advanced Twitter" with the Heritage Foundation) and the special sessions on straight-up ideology ("Standing Up to Obama's Union Thugs," "The Left Exposed" with ACORN videographer James O'Keefe), it's getting as difficult to tell basic training from espionage as it is young from old.

"Why do you need Facebook when you have email?" asked an older gentleman in one of the breakout sessions on Twitter. Snicker all you will — and plenty in this packed room did — but what does it say about the much-reported death of the Tea Party that a senior citizen traveled to Minneapolis to learn how to use the Internet to promote far-right conservatism? Maybe he even signed up for Facebook, and friended a candidate.

Presidential hopefuls weren't the only ones angling for attention, either. Lest one think RightOnline is a gathering of unimportant bloggers from mothers' basements nationwide, not only was the average age of attendees well over 45, but Facebook sent an associate manager for policy to run a breakout session of its own. The Dole Nutrition Institute provided bananas and juice — as well as Senior Vice President Jennifer Grossman, who said at her panel, "We're against Obamacare." The C-SPAN team, meanwhile, wanted to make it very clear that the channel, despite some apparent beliefs to the contrary, is not funded by the government.

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The Activists Go to J-School

At an increasingly typical session, this one focusing on "Wiki Accountability," another retired man wanted to know how to classify as press so he didn't have to pay for Freedom of Information Act requests. The instructor, Jonathan Collegio of the group Crossroads GPS, explained that sometimes FOIAs are fulfilled more quickly and bypass scrutiny if they aren't filed with a press exemption. Later, his fellow instructor suggested a workaround for releasing White House emails: request information on the agency with whom administration officials corresponded, "such as the EPA."

Now, critical shorthand is that an Americans for Prosperity weekend is nothing short of a Koch Brothers-funded propaganda fest — a charge that is twice as simplistic as it is correct. AFP is, essentially, a deep-pocketed political action group kinetically agitating to shrink government power and regulation. It openly supported Tea Party candidates in the last election, and its hatred of the EPA is only second to its venom for Obamacare.

But as much as it all sounds like amplification, the grassroots have action in them. From boardroom to boardroom — be it "Basic Investigative Reporting Skills" or "Journalism vs. Blogging: Building Credibility" — session attendees wanted, almost ceaselessly, to know how to find government contacts and communications. RightOnline — and online-activism groups like American Majority, which encourages positive reviews for conservative books and the trashing of liberal ones — is moving beyond Joe the Plumber to put the everyday conservative base on equal footing with all the journalists out there who have, as Michelle Malkin likes to put it, fancy Columbia University educations.

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Indeed, several speakers at RightOnline outright bragged about having no formal journalism training. Malkin, who blogs at Hot Air and is a fixture on Fox News, called for reporting to become "an act, and not a club." During his address at the awards dinner on Friday night — by far the rock-star event of the conference — Breitbart posed a hypothetical: What if a math teacher in Sioux Falls were to berate her student about how Sarah Palin can't be president?

"Film that bitch!" Breitbart bellowed. "Because I am petty. And that is news... and I want to fire that lady."

The new (big) journalism's egalitarian approach, though, is no longer egalitarian when it comes to merely its targets. Sure, Breitbart relishes in taking down a Congressman — no matter what he says to the contrary — but the post-Weinergate way of Web monitoring is about making watchdogs out of anyone, to watch anywhere, all the time. As Breitbart said in his speech, "The most important tip I can give you is to be petty. On Twitter, I don't care if its @chablis5322 with two followers. I will argue with that person... for eight hours."

Wolfe's @PatriotUSA76 account described him as "Conservative Reagan Republican. No Obamacare, socialism, sharia. Proud of the USA & Proud to be an American with NO apologies. No elitists need apply." Looking around at the nearly 1,500 people at RightOnline — their faces aglow from laptops, iPads, iPhones, Blackberries, and, above all, desire — that last part seemed to apply to them all: They can't all stumble upon an Anthony Weiner junk shot, much less save it in their browser cache, but they wouldn't feel at all bad if they did.

For the best quotes from this weekend — Bachmann, Pawlenty, and a whole lot more — click the button below....

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